Outside/Inside
(2009) 11 min.
soprano, electronics
Text by Text by Paul Mann
Premiere
premiered February 21, 2009
Lucy Shelton, soprano
17th Ussachevsky Memorial Festival
Lyman Hall, Pomona College
Claremont, California
Notes
Outside/Inside is a setting of selected poems of Paul Mann, who teaches in the Pomona College English Department, and was written for soprano Lucy Shelton.
It seems to me that this poetry connects the world outside with human internal experience on many levels. Images of roaring seas are intertwined with those of the inner voices of the writer; sand and thoughts drift in similar patterns. The poems in the center of the set are more personal, one referring to one of the poet’s daughters by name, but they still oscillate between experiencing inner and outer worlds.
One of the pleasures of working on the piece has been the strange juxtaposition of the actual solitary act of composing with the sense of companionship that comes of knowing the poet and performer personally, and hearing their voices in every moment of work.
All of the electronic sounds in the piece are derived from the voices of the poet Paul Mann and soprano Lucy Shelton, often with little disguise.
Lyrics
I.
sea roaring like thought roaring
in the world’s ears, as if the world had ears
whenever I write one of my voices is whining
whenever I write one of my voices is missing
II.
outside an endless wave inside a point seen outside seeing
shoreline, white tidelace, drawn lines of pelicans in flight
offshore fog a shore of air
thought drifts as sand in wind
the wind blows waves of sand against the words
outside breeze, nor sounds of sand nor other
air or
III.
your small face mirror of all loss
already disappearing thru yourself
to stone, to air
most substantial, most
invisible of all
IV.
flowers or fists, her small
lungs hidden, one
cannot know
how grows
how blossoms or how twists
her breath in air particular & dense
I want to know & know
that thought is violate, to reach
into & be sure
should I sentence me for bringing
her dehiscent
into such a texture
V.
go little wisdom
alien of us
exosophia
soon you will know what I unknowing
what thought gives off & I
am left
o little there your lips
to breast, to dust
word word with infant lips
VI.
high cliffs or towers, wind
swept rim of a broad green bowl
hill beyond hill the treelines shading
ridge beyond ridge to the fading bay
the sublime begins as inclination
psyche whistling in the ears,
prosthetic vistas
I might imagine me remembering me seeing this fading
world as God sees it
curved inside the mind
past death
the edge of fading
VII.
I with the wrong song sagging from my lips
sing only to an ear of air: you
You
–Paul Mann
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